It's a little past 9 a.m. on a Tuesday, the height of the morning commute. But the platform at Baghdad's central rail station, which a few years back would have been bustling with activity, is abandoned.

Iraq's storied railways are a worthy barometer of progress in postwar Iraq. Much as the rings of a centuries old redwood reveal clues to a forest's past, Iraq's railroads offer traces of the forces and tumult that have wracked this region for much of the past century.

"This is among the great old companies of Iraq," says Salam Salom, the traffic and operations manager for the Iraqi Republic Railways Co. "Just as Iraq has risen, fallen, risen, and fallen again, so have the railroads. And like Iraq, they'll rise again."

The trains are both a legacy of European colonialism and a testament to Arab efforts to shake off that yoke. In the early years of the 20th century, Iraq's British-built railroads prospered. In European capitals, posters for the Simplon-Orient Express boasted, "London-Baghdad in eight days: safety, rapidity, economy." Mystery writer Agatha Christie made the trip in 1938, and used it as the basis for her novel, "Murder on the Orient Express."

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Iraq's railroads were the thriving workhorse of an oil-fueled industrialization drive, transporting the bulk of the country's cement, oil, fertilizer, grain, and steel. Iraq was a model in the developing world at that time and its railroad men gained a reputation as first-class engineers.

"Everyone looked at the people who worked the railways with envy," Zuher Hadi Ali, the director of the Iraqi Railways Institute, says of his first days as a young railroading student. "You were someone. You had free housing, you got to travel all over the world to study. Working on the trains had prestige, and we were good at what we did."

Similarly, Iraq's transportation minister, Salam Malaki, a young political upstart, fondly recalls his first trip on a train as a 13-year-old boy in 1985.

"It was amazing," he says. "In the middle of summer, the temperature was 100-plus degrees, but the cars were all air conditioned. Waiters brought us food and cold drinks."

A $2 billion repair bill

On the few passenger trains still operating in Iraq today, the air conditioning has since ceased to function. A decade-long war with Iran, followed by a decade of UN sanctions, left the rails in poor shape. The US invasion in 2003 and the looting that followed decimated what was left. A postwar survey estimated that restoration would require $2 billion.

Rebuilding the railroads, essential to the country's economic recovery, was a US and Iraqi priority from Day 1. But despite $220 million in US aid, reconstruction has gone awry, with a lack of security, and rampant corruption taking a heavy toll. Like the country's electrical output, water treatment, and oil production, the railways are operating at just 3 percent of their prewar capacity, according to railroad officials.

Insurgent activity has stopped most train travel between the Iraqi capital and the south and to western Iraq, according to Iraqi railways spokesman Khames al-Rubai.

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